Power Systems Resilience Assessment: Hardening and Smart Operational Enhancement Strategies

TLDR

Power systems are engineered for frequent, low‑impact outages, yet extreme events such as severe weather can cause rare but catastrophic failures, making resilience a pressing but still poorly defined goal for critical infrastructure. This paper introduces core concepts of power‑system resilience and explores hardening and smart operational strategies to enhance it. The authors present a resilience trapezoid, define essential resilience features, and develop the ΦΛEΠ framework with metrics, then apply it to a 29‑bus Great Britain test network to assess extreme windstorm impacts. The study shows that various hardening and smart operational strategies effectively improve resilience, confirming the practicality of the proposed concepts.

Abstract

Power systems have typically been designed to be reliable to expected, low-impact high-frequency outages. In contrast, extreme events, driven for instance by extreme weather and natural disasters, happen with low-probability, but can have a high impact. The need for power systems, possibly the most critical infrastructures in the world, to become resilient to such events is becoming compelling. However, there is still little clarity as to this relatively new concept. On these premises, this paper provides an introduction to the fundamental concepts of power systems resilience and to the use of hardening and smart operational strategies to improve it. More specifically, first the resilience trapezoid is introduced as visual tool to reflect the behavior of a power system during a catastrophic event. Building on this, the key resilience features that a power system should boast are then defined, along with a discussion on different possible hardening and smart, operational resilience enhancement strategies. Further, the so-called ΦΛEΠ resilience assessment framework is presented, which includes a set of resilience metrics capable of modeling and quantifying the resilience performance of a power system subject to catastrophic events. A case study application with a 29-bus test version of the Great Britain transmission network is carried out to investigate the impacts of extreme windstorms. The effects of different hardening and smart resilience enhancement strategies are also explored, thus demonstrating the practicality of the different concepts presented.